Tons of trash scooped up from coastal beaches

SANTA CRUZ — While Santiago Morales was out jogging at 8:30 a.m. Saturday, he saw a group of 30 people on Cowell Beach with buckets and plastic gloves. It was a beach cleanup.

"I saw everyone gathering for a beach cleanup and it seemed like a good idea," said Morales, 29, of Santa Cruz.

Saturday's efforts went beyond a normal beach cleanup at Cowell Beach. It was part of the annual Coastal Cleanup Day, the world's largest volunteer event, said officials from Save Our Shores, a nonprofit that organizes the event locally.

In addition to the more than 3,000 volunteers in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties cleaning up around 75 sites, people in California were picking up trash from more than 800 locations. Around the world, volunteers in 100 countries were expected to pick up trash.

"We're participating in the largest volunteer event on the planet," said Rachel Kippen, program manager for Save Our Shores. "You don't get to say that every day."

Small items hard to find

At Cowell Beach, Morales walked along the shoreline picking up small pieces of plastic and cigarette butts.

"The big trash is easy to find," Morales said. "But sometimes it's the small trash that does the most damage."

In his bucket were a handful of cigarette butts and what appeared to be tines from a plastic fork.

Officials weighing the trash said cigarette butts are the most common items volunteers find.

"I could walk back and forth and kick up more and more cigarette butts," Kippen said.

For 2012, about 17,000 pounds of waste was collected. This year's cleanup netted roughly 17,150 pounds.

Elkhorn Slough top site

In Monterey County, 1,039 volunteers fanned out across 81 miles of beach and removed just more than 8,000 pounds. The top cleanup site was the Elkhorn Slough Estuarine Research Reserve, where almost 4,800 pounds of debris were collected.

In Salinas, volunteers took away 1,166 pounds of debris from Upper Carr Lake. New cleanup sites this year in Monterey County were Garrapata State Beach, Highway 1 in Big Sur and a neighborhood cleanup in Monterey near Bay Photo and the Monterey hostel.

Inspiring change

Despite the drizzle, the volunteers at Cowell Beach walked around with orange and green buckets, sifting through the sand for bits of trash. People visiting the beach for fun looked on with curiosity.

"We're inspiring behavior change and affecting how they take care of beaches," Kippen said.

Derek Polka, 24, was at the beach 9 a.m. to help with the cleanup. In first hour, he picked up cigarette butts, plastic caps, small pieces of plastic and dental floss, which surprised him.

"It's like why would you bring your gross, plastic in-your-mouth thing that shouldn't even be there," said Polka, of Santa Cruz.

But the most disgusting part to Polka was how long the trash would take to degrade if left on the beach.